e are
attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate
enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are
awakened into life. The promise of the year is blasted and shrivelled
and burned up before them. Our most salutary and most beautiful
institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is
no more than stubble. It is in the nature of these eruptive diseases in
the state to sink in by fits and reappear. But the fuel of the malady
remains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest degree mitigated in
its malignity, though it waits the favorable moment of a freer
communication with the source of regicide to exert and to increase its
force.

Is it that the people are changed, that the commonwealth cannot be
protected by its laws? I hardly think it. On the contrary, I conceive
that these things happen because men are not changed, but remain always
what they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be,
when abandoned to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or
control: that is, made to be full of a blind elevation in prosperity; to
despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; to
find no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a present
inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow and to bow to
fortune; to admire successful, though wicked enterprise, and to imitate
what we admire; to contemn the government which announces danger from
sacrilege and regicide whilst they are only in their infancy and their
struggle, but which finds nothing that can alarm in their adult state,
and in the power and triumph of those destructive principles. In a mass
we cannot be left to ourselves. We must have leaders. If none will
undertake to lead us right, we shall find guides who will contrive to
conduct us to shame and ruin.

We are in a war of a _peculiar_ nature. It is not with an ordinary
community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may
veer about,--not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and
abandons it through lassitude. We are at war with a system which by its
essence is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or
war as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion. It is with
an _armed doctrine_ that we are at war. It has, by its essence, a
faction of opinion and of interest and of enthusiasm in every country.
To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our Ch